CISL operates and oversees computing facilities, both virtual and physical, and ensures that the hardware and software needs of the scientific community are met. CISL develops and curates research data sets and maintains online user access to the archive. CISL also provides virtualization and grid technologies, promoting collaboration and sharing of valuable scientific resources.

CISL has been providing world-class supercomputing and data management services to its user community for decades. See our Supercomputers page for a look at the history of these systems.

Facilities

CISL deploys and operates the physical and virtual computational facilities needed to support the science community.

NWSC — The NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC), which opened in October 2012, is a world-class center for high-performance scientific computing in the atmospheric sciences.

Mesa Lab Computing Facility — High-end computing has been a vital facility at NCAR since it was founded, and NCAR's Mesa Lab computing center has handled the computational requirements of the atmospheric and related sciences community for forty years, coping with technology changes that span orders of magnitude in performance and data storage capacity.

Community Computing — NCAR's virtual Community Computing facility provides computing support for NCAR research and extends the computing resources for university scientists so they can pursue investigations beyond the scope of university computing centers.

Climate Simulation Lab — The Climate Simulation Laboratory (CSL) at NCAR is a dedicated climate model computing facility that supports the multiagency US Global Change Research Program by providing high-performance computing and data storage systems for large-scale, long-running simulations of the Earth's climate system.

XSEDE — NCAR is part of the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project. NCAR’s role is to provide support aimed at deploying, hardening, and optimizing software systems necessary for the geoscience community to create new knowledge using XSEDE resources and related technologies.

Visualization Laboratory (Vislab) — NCAR's Visualization Lab is both an AccessGrid site and a state-of-the-art scientific visualization environment capable of stereo projection.

Gateways and Grids

CISL develops science gateways and other Grid-based technologies to support and enhance the development of virtual organizations.

Chronopolis — NCAR has partnered with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the UCSD Libraries, and UMIACS in creating Chronopolis as a national center for the management, long-term preservation, and promulgation of national digital assets.

Climate Data Gateway — It integrates supercomputers with large-scale data and analysis servers located at numerous national labs and research centers to create a powerful environment for next generation climate research.

XSEDE — NCAR is part of the National Science Foundation's Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) project, which replaces and expands the TeraGrid – a nationwide cyberinfrastructure effort that served the HPC needs of a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines for a decade.

Hardware

Cheyenne — Cheyenne is a new 5.34-petaflops, high-performance computer built for NCAR by SGI. The new supercomputer was installed at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in the second half of 2016 and became operational in January 2017.

Yellowstone — A 1.5-petaflops high-performance computing system with 72,288 processor cores and 144 terabytes of memory. It is housed at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC).

Geyser and Caldera — The Geyser and Caldera clusters are specialized data analysis and visualization resources within the data-centric Yellowstone environment.

GLADE — The central GLADE file system significantly expands the disk space available to CISL users and allows users to access their data from both HPC and DAV systems.

HPSS — The CISL archival storage resource, the High-Performance Storage System (HPSS) environment, stores more than 66 PB of data in support of CISL computing facilities and NCAR research activities.

CISL has been providing world-class supercomputing and data management services to its user community for decades. See our Supercomputers page for a look at the history of these systems.

Software

CISL and NCAR have developed and support a number of freely available software packages for visualization, data analysis, and high-performance computation. Most of these packages are installed on CISL resources.

Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) is a community facility for ensemble DA developed and maintained by the Data Assimilation Research Section (DAReS) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

Digital Asset Services Hub (DASH) — The Digital Asset Services Hub is a centralized location for NCAR/UCAR Community Programs (UCP) community members to receive support, engagement, and training resources for managing, sharing, and working with NCAR/UCP’s digital assets, including data sets, publications, software, and models.

Research Data Archive (RDA) — The CISL Research Data Archive contains a large and diverse collection of meteorological and oceanographic observations, operational and reanalysis model outputs, and remote sensing data sets to support atmospheric and geosciences research, along with ancillary data sets, such as topography/bathymetry, vegetation, and land use.